What is it with the Trump campaign and technology? Donald Trump was noticeably sniffing during much of the debate as can be seen in the following supercut.
Obviously Trump didn't want to admit that he was either nervous or sick, so he said that this noise was produced by a malfunctioning microphone. But look closely at his face. See how he closes his mouth immediately before each sniffing sound. You can see that the expression on his face is perfectly synched with the sound of his sniffing. It had to be a very special microphone to be able to malfunction in perfect synchronization with the expression on his face.
Interestingly enough, this is not the first time that someone involved with the Trump campaign blamed an embarrassing performance on faulty equipment. Watch Trump spokesperson Katrina Pierson make the remarkable claim in the following video that it was President Obama who invaded Afghanistan. Actually, it was President Bush who attacked Afghanistan as retaliation for 9/11. Those who are under 25 and who have never read a newspaper or history book and those from another planet might not know this, but we attacked Afghanistan because their Taliban government was harboring Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind of the 9/11 attack.
Needless to say, Pierson received a lot of flak for her screw-up. So what did she do? She blamed her poor performance on a faulty earpiece.
And who can forget this interview where Trump failed to condemn David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan? Notice Trump refused to condemn Duke because he said he didn't know what he stood for. He also did not condemn the Ku Klux Klan after Jake Tapper mentioned their name.
As you can see, Trump refused to repudiated David Duke because he said that he didn't know who David Duke was. However, as this compilation of his past statements by the Washington Post shows, he had talked about, and disavaowed David Duke several times in the past. In 2000 he even called Duke a "bigot" and a "racist". So clearly, he lied when he said that he didn't know who David Duke was in this interview.
I'm sitting in a house in Florida with a very bad earpiece that they gave me, and you could hardly hear what he was saying. But what I heard was various groups, and I don't mind disavowing anybody, and I disavowed David Duke and I disavowed him the day before at a major news conference, which is surprising because he was at the major news conference, CNN was at the major news conference, and they heard me very easily disavow David Duke," the Republican presidential frontrunner explained on NBC's "Today." (emphasis added)
As I stated at the press conference on Friday regarding David Duke- I disavow. pic.twitter.com/OIXFKPUlz2
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 28, 2016
Those of us in public life can only resent the use of our names by those who seek political recognition for the repugnant doctrines of hate they espouse.
The politics of racial hatred and religious bigotry practiced by the Klan and others have no place in this country, and are destructive of the values for which America has always stood.